


Oedipus

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus [17]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Friendship, Master of Death Harry Potter, Murder, Time Travel, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-06-30 21:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15759780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: On a day that never happened, but could have, in July of 1971 James Potter meets a mysterious red headed time traveler and things do not go well.





	Oedipus

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory note that this is NOT CANON

“Hey, Lily-flower, what brings you to Diagon Alley this fine morning?”

 

James Potter didn’t realize it at the time but by saying those few words he had just made the first in a series of grand mistakes that would have significant bearing on his life.

 

He’d seen her from behind, spotted the red hair, the pale curve of her face and without a thought had gone rushing towards her. It wasn’t every day one saw the muggle born beauty Lily Evans, his beloved girlfriend and hell flower, basking in the crowded and turbulent atmosphere of Diagon Alley.

 

He’d thought it was odd that she was there so early in the summer, especially when he hadn’t arranged to meet with her, but then maybe she’d wanted to get a look at the new school books early or grab some new Potions supplies. There were many reasons why the lovely Lily might be in Diagon Alley on a hot July day and so he didn’t question it too closely.

 

That was his first mistake.

 

She turned swiftly, a speed that would have been awkward if it wasn’t for the fluidity of the movement, for a moment she didn’t look like a seventeen year old girl but rather like an experienced duelist. Which, Lily wasn’t bad at dueling but she certainly wasn’t great either, Lily had never professed an interest in being an auror like he had.

 

She blinked at him without expression, as if she didn’t recognize him, and for a moment as she blankly stared at him without words he felt distinctly uncomfortable and wondered if it maybe wasn’t Lily. And then he realized it couldn’t be Lily, she was too young and much too short, she looked like a first or maybe a second year. She had the same eyes, almost the same hair even if it was a bit curlier, but her face was much paler and thinner.

 

“Oh, I’m… I’m terribly sorry.” He wondered for a moment if he could possibly explain that he’d mistaken her for his much older girlfriend. This, he felt, was one of his bad moments.

 

“You look like Death.”

 

“What?”

 

Her eyes were narrowed, and she looked as if she was breaking him into pieces and sewing him back again, or like he was some puzzle that wasn’t quite fitting the way she wanted to. “No, the face is wrong, and your eyes too…”

 

She trailed off and her eyes dulled and it looked as if she now found him to be considerably less interesting. She turned back to the table and away from him leaving him to stare at her very red hair.

 

People didn’t really ignore James Potter, he was far too charming, handsome, and dare he admit it the heir to a noble house and the much younger apparently not Lily was the most interesting thing he’d seen all morning. Certainly more interesting than his original plan of loitering downtown and checking out the latest model of broomstick that wouldn’t even be out for another six months (although he would be checking out that broomstick at the earliest convenience, multiple times, with Sirius, and it would be glorious).

 

He walked around to the other side of the table, pulled up the open seat, and sat down peering across at her. Her eyes flickered up for a moment and then back down to the table where various papers were strewn across the surface.

 

“Hello, we haven’t introduced ourselves yet.” He reached out with a hand opening his mouth to introduce himself as James, the greatest quidditch chaser Hogwarts had ever seen, and all around marauder.

 

“You’re still here?” She asked her eyebrows raising dubiously.

 

“Of course, my little princess, where else would I be?”

 

She set down her pen and looked at him with more contemplation than before, again as if he was something to be solved rather than talked to, “You called me Lily, before, not many people know to call me that and those that do are a trifle dangerous. Should I be worried?”

 

He felt his smile drop slightly, a little stunned, and he couldn’t help but think to himself that he may be in the presence of a master. What was it that muggles called it, Sirius might know and Lily certainly would, but it was the blank serious expression that no one could doubt used when gambling. Pockey face? Whatever it was she had it and it really made him question whether she was serious or not, and the trouble was he couldn’t tell. He’d always wanted a face like that, composure, because as it was every time someone talked about a prank or accused him he started grinning and ended up in detention.

 

“Oh, I like you, I like you a lot. So your name’s Lily, then, I have a Lily-flower of my own, you know. She’s the most beautiful and temperamental of all the flowers in the valley and she once threw a text book at my head.” Of course Lily Evans had done many other things to him as well in the earlier years of their courtship, or rather the time when he wished he was courting her but she despised his existence, but she’d come around eventually and now their relationship was much less painful.

 

He’d have to make it more of a habit, he thought, hanging around firsties. He did his job as prefect and soon he’d be doing his job as headboy, so he came into contact with them more than other students his age, but he’d never realized how entertaining eleven year olds were.

 

“So, what is it you’re working on today, little princess?” He grabbed one of her papers and immediately regretted it.

 

It looked vaguely like runes, but not, after some thought he realized they were Greek letters instead of the normal Elder Futhark runes that he was familiar with. More than that though it wasn’t just Greek but rather numbers were thrown in there too, like arithmancy, until it was a mishmash of garbled mathematics.

 

Was it a prank, he wondered, had he somehow been caught in a prank the types of which he’d never seen? He’d talked about these sorts of things with Sirius, he loved giant spiders, pranking Snivvilus, but he’d wondered if they could go a bit further. Because the laughs with them only lasted a few seconds, maybe a few minutes, and it was always great in hindsight but everyone else forgot about it the next day.

 

“I want to do something big, Padfoot, bigger than big. I want to do something new!”

 

But with Sirius’ family troubles, Moony’s furry little problem, and the political tension hanging in the air things had been a little difficult. Sirius went hardcore into the pranking last year, throwing himself into it, and James sometimes wondered if that had been the sign that he was about to leave.

 

Sirius’ little Slytherin brother, Regelus, wouldn’t even look at Sirius anymore. It was as if Sirius had died.

 

“Time dilation, mathematics, physics… The general manipulation of the space time continuum.” Her voice stunned him out of his thoughts and he almost jumped at the sound.

 

“I’m sorry?” He asked, he’d heard some of the words before but most of it sounded like as much gibberish as she’d written on the paper.

 

“I’ve caught myself in a dead end, you see I do have an easy solution to this whole… mess I’m in right now but easy isn’t always good. Easy could tear apart the already fragile fabric of reality and cause all matter to fall back into nothingness. Nothingness equals Rabbit and believe me, you don’t want to be Rabbit at the end of things. So, I have to do the hard way, which involves lots of math and building things…” She sighed and threw her hands up into the air as if this couldn’t be helped.

 

He had the alarming thought, for only a second, that if he wasn’t already in love with the beautiful Lily-flower he would have bent on one knee and asked this smaller, more disheveled, Lily to join him in holy matrimony.

 

It was the greatest prank he’d ever seen, he was uncomfortable, alarmed, and he had no idea what to do with the situation. It was like everything he’d tried to produce in every professor, every student, everyone he’d ever pranked.

 

(It had to be a prank; there was no other explanation. Was there?)

 

“Come with me.” He said, barely registering the words as they fell out of his mouth.

 

“What?” She asked, those gloriously dubious eyebrows raising again as she questioned his sanity.

 

“Today, come with me. Meet the marauders, tell us your secrets, bring your… whatever the hell you just scribbled on a page. Just, come, and I guarantee you it is a journey you will never forget!”

 

This was his second mistake.

 

She did come, she hadn’t taken too much convincing, and they’d spent the day wandering around Diagon Alley. Inside the quidditch shop and elsewhere and the whole time she’d oscillated between looking somewhat bored and distantly amused as if he was some shiny distracting bauble rather than a person.

 

He also learned that she was rather mysterious.

 

“So, which house are you in?” He asked, she didn’t have her school robes on, and instead was wearing a curiously muggle outfit that looked nothing like any of his girlfriend’s outfits. It consisted of a very large colorful sweater and frayed light blue shorts, they looked worn, and more than that there were various stains and he wasn’t quite sure what to think of it.

 

“Currently, none, lost in the fourth dimension remember? Can’t exactly go to Hogwarts if I don’t exist yet.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

She eyed him for a moment and seemed to come to some decision and then began to casually explain, “I’m a time traveler, by accident really, but I suppose that’s all beside the point until I find a way to fix it without making scrambled eggs out of the fabric of reality.”

 

“A time traveler?” He asked and he wondered if it was true or if it was some prank, the trouble was that he couldn’t tell, she looked perfectly serious but she was so young. And it was unheard of to travel back more than a few hours with a time turner, and the way she was talking made it sound like it had been at least a decade, “How did that happen?”

 

A dark expression crossed her features and she gave him a grim smile, “Things spiraled swiftly and immensely out of my control; it seems to be a pattern.”

 

“That wasn’t very specific.” He pointed out but she didn’t respond but instead looked forward with that grave expression that looked far too serious for any firstie to wear.

 

“Where are you staying then, since you can’t go to Hogwarts and you don’t exist yet?” He asked.

 

“I haven’t really decided. The place I thought I could go is kind of off limits as I’m already recorded as not being there during this time period, if I go I’d create a paradox, not that paradoxes are inherently bad you understand simply that they stretch reality a bit more than I usually like. Anyway, not important, I don’t really know.”

 

It’d seemed natural to offer her a place to stay. They were already hosting Sirius and his mother would kill him if he’d left an eleven old girl alone without a place to return to in Diagon Alley.

 

Besides, he had the feeling that if he let her walk away then he’d never see her again, and he liked her enough that he didn’t want that to happen.

 

His parents had taken it all a little more seriously than he thought they would.

 

“A time traveler?” His father asked repeating his own words from a few hours before, “She can’t be more than thirteen though… What did she say her name was?”

 

“Lily, that’s all she said.” And in reflection she hadn’t even said that, she’d just commented on how he called her that and how that supposedly made him dangerous.

 

“And you haven’t seen her at Hogwarts before?” His mother chimed in and he shook his head, he’d wondered if he’d overlooked her but on reflection he would have remembered a little girl who looked so much like his own Lily-flower; especially if they had the same name. Of course, she could be foreign, but she didn’t have an accent and she hadn’t looked lost in Diagon Alley. If anything she’d known it better than even he had.

 

“Well, I don’t believe it myself. All the same though the girl can stay here until her parents arrive; better here than on the streets.”

 

Her parents never did arrive though. The English wizarding community was fairly small, even with the addition of muggle borns there weren’t too many of them, and so as summer drifted on they were certain that someone would know something about her.

 

It was like she’d said though, like she appeared out of thin air, or was from some other time because no one came looking at all.

 

“I’m actually an orphan.” She’d said at one point when he’d coerced her into playing chess. She had an odd style, there were times when she was very good, absurdly good, and times when she was unbelievably awful as if she had no interest in thinking out any basic strategy. It always made for an interesting game though because he never knew going in what kind of challenge he would have.

 

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” He’d said but she’d stated it so emotionlessly that he wasn’t quite sure how to say it. She’d said it like it was a fact, like her having red hair and green eyes, like it was something unchangeable about her that wasn’t all that interesting.

 

“I never really knew them. People say they were nice, stupid, but nice.” She eyed the board with a calculative gleam in her eyes, leaning forward and shutting him out, as if there was only her and the board.

 

“How did it happen?”

 

“War and prophecy. Nasty business really, but then they were chess pieces on the wrong side of the board at the wrong time, there really was nothing they could do.” She moved a piece and placed herself into check, “It’s for the best though, without their deaths I would never have met Lenin, and without Lenin I would never have been myself.”

 

Sirius didn’t like her at all.

 

“She’s creepy as hell, James.” He’d said after meeting her.

 

James had to say it could have gone better. It’d mostly been them staring at each other for too long and then she’d gone and said, “I thought you’d be more manic.”

 

And that was all she’d been willing to say before wandering off elsewhere in the house to do some uninterrupted math and work on getting herself back to her own time. A concept James still didn’t quite understand, because how could one move forward in time?

 

“Are you kidding? What if it’s an act, Sirius, what if it’s all some elaborate joke? Well, not really a joke that’s too light of a word, joke is what we do… What if it’s a play that she puts on for an audience where no one appreciates it? It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen!”

 

Sirius just stared at him for a few moments, no humor in his expression, and then said, “Are you mental? People don’t put on acts, not like that, it’s not normal. Jokes are funny, she’s like a boggart when it first comes out of the closet.”

 

Sirius had been twitchy for a while though, for years really, but it’d gotten pretty bad since he’d left home. Everything even remotely Slytherin wasn’t even laughed at but was instead hated with a passion. James hated the snakes as much as anyone else but sometimes he thought Sirius took it too far.

 

(There were times when he wondered if Sirius really had meant to kill Snape that night. James tried not to think about it too often.)

 

Still, in spite of Sirius’ reservations he had thought that it was best that he introduce Little Lily to everyone. She seemed so alone sometimes, he’d catch her staring out windows in the early morning, looking dully at her own reflection and there was something so wrong with that picture. And besides, as the most interesting thing that had happened to him all summer it really was best that she meet the whole crew.

 

This was his third mistake.

 

“So, uh, Little Lily… How long have you and James known each other?”

 

The marauders were back in Diagon Alley, only a little bit before start of school, and James had decided to take Little Lily along for the ride. He’d thought it would go great, well if not great then okay, but it was going neither.

 

There was Sirius, glaring at her like usual, and Moony and Wormtail were just looking at her like they didn’t know what to make of her. Little Lily for her own part was staring right back with an expression he couldn’t place except that it might be severely tested tolerance, as if James was really toeing some line bringing her here today. Which was ridiculous because as far as he could tell she had no friends, no family, and while a goddess of comedy that was not enough to fill the void in her life. If anything, James thought, she should be grateful.

 

“About a month.” Lily said, “He mistook me for his love interest.”

 

“Oh, right, bigger Lily… I mean I guess you do sort of look like her…” Moony said and then grimaced slightly probably noting that Little Lily was much littler than the other Lily. James was sort of embarrassed about that whole thing, because there was no reason that he should have mistaken an eleven year old for his very not eleven year old girlfriend, but at the same time sometimes if he looked at Little Lily from the right angle…

 

Lily shrugged as if to convey that she had no idea how James could have gotten them mixed up.

 

“So…” Peter started searching for the end of the sentence but coming up with nothing. They’d all already asked James for the how on the time traveling but she never gave him any details. Just that statement of things spiraling out of control and that there had been some sort of a war and a prophecy.

 

The silence weighed heavily on all of them, with Sirius’ glare tightening, Moony growing increasingly awkward, and Peter just searching for words. It was a gloriously awkward moment if only it hadn’t been happening to him.

 

“Yeah, super, I’m going to stop this here.” She said and regarded each of them coolly, her eyes finally settling on James, “It’s been great Glasses, but I think it’s time that our relationship came to a shuddering halt.”

 

“Glasses?” James asked, realizing he was wearing glasses but still, “And what are you talking about? What do you mean?”

 

“I mean that the country’s on the brink of a civil war, which really ends up being more of an urban guerilla revolutionary movement, and I’m currently trapped in the past and I really don’t have time to pal around with you, angry, jitters, and strangely rat-like.” She said pointing to him, Sirius, Remus, and Peter in turn each looking somewhat offended by his chosen name.

 

He wanted to laugh it off, like he usually did most of the things she said, and he tried but it just wasn’t funny. The way she was staring at them, the causal disregard, as if looking at them she saw nothing was not only disconcerting but also very hurtful. He liked Little Lily, he had thought that they were friends, that she cared about his existence.

 

And the things she said…

 

“What do you mean a civil war?” James asked slowly his fingers clenching on the table.

 

“You know now that you mention it there is a disturbing lack of rumors, propaganda, and general terror given that this is 1977. This is 1977, right? I checked the date on The Prophet but you never know with The Prophet.” She paused here for a moment, looking as if she was digging through her memory for some vital piece of information, and then with a relieved smile corrected herself, “No wait, this is only the beginning of the movement, the recruitment phase. Things don’t get really nasty until the really late 70’s. Oh, that makes so much more sense.”

 

“What the hell are you talking about?!” Sirius snapped slamming his hands on the table and looking more disturbed than the rest of them.

 

In any other circumstance James would have taken this for a joke, he wanted to take it as a joke, but somehow the way she said it granted it gravity. And the way Sirius was taking it, he knew things had been bad at home, that they had been bad for a while but he didn’t know all the details. The way Sirius was talking it was like he really believed her, and he had never believed that she was a time traveler or anything else she said before.

 

Here she looked at them, almost puzzled, and then said, “You know who.”

 

“Who?”

 

“He who must not be named.” She replied cocking her head as she looked at Sirius, “Is this not a thing yet?”

 

Again there was a moment of tense silence where she and Sirius stared into eachother’s eyes waiting for the other to step down and James just kept thinking that she was leaving and that there was a war coming.

 

Then Sirius laughed and slumped back into his seat with a manic smile on his face, “You’re lying. James is right, this is some kind of a joke, a terrible really bad joke. I’d leave the art of pranking to the professionals, Little Lily.”

 

“Well then, I guess it’s not that important anyway.” She gave them a thin smile and then raised a hand in a muggle salute, “Good luck in the coming revolution my bourgeois companions may you come to prosper in the following anarchy and bloodshed.”

 

And with that she walked out of the store and onto the street without looking back once. As if it was only a month ago in Diagon Alley and they were both strangers at a table without even a name to call each other by.

 

It was an impulse decision more than anything else, a need to see it close, to not leave it hanging.

 

He stood and ran out into the street after her to talk to her one final time.

 

This was his fourth mistake.

 

“Lily!” He called after her and she turned stopping in the street to look at him. She looked at him with that same expression he had first seen on her face with her eyes like Lily Evans’ and not like Lily Evans’ all at the same time.

 

“Lily, I…” He said the words falling out of his head and into his mouth with nothing profound to follow them.

 

He’d always been told he had a way with words.

 

“I’ll talk with you one last time, glasses.” She said giving him a soft smile and with that he ran up to her and they headed to a new location.

 

It was a quiet pub, deep in the heart of Knockturn Alley, just around the corner from Riddle Incorporated. It wasn’t well kept, having a grungy dirty feel to the place, and even though he was going to become an auror he couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable and out of place.

 

She seemed right at home.

 

“Are you sure this is where you want to talk?” He asked her as she swallowed down some of the frothing butterbeer she had ordered.

 

“You called me Lily when you first saw me.” She responded instead looking at him out of the corner of her eye, “Do you know why people who call me Lily are a trifle dangerous?”

 

“No.” He said shaking his head and she gave him a rather sharp smile for a little girl one that shouldn’t belong to a little girl.

 

“Because they are very observant and they are players of the game as well as pieces. Chess is a bad metaphor, I use it because I am expected to use it, but ultimately I would prefer some other game of strategy. Chess only allows two sides, two players, the good, the bad, the black, the white, and of course then there are the pieces themselves. If you’re a pawn you can only ever be a pawn, you can’t step into the role of the king or even a bishop, and if you’re a player you aren’t any piece at all.”

 

“What does that mean?” He found himself asking quietly.

 

“It means that things are always both particles and waves. When you called me Lily, in calling me Lily, I thought you knew that.”

 

Her unspoken words rang through his head, but you don’t.

 

“You’re name isn’t really Lily, then?” He asked and she shrugged.

 

“It is and it isn’t. It’s close enough for me, it’s what I call myself.” She responded which was probably the best answer he was going to get out of her so he nodded.

 

He asked his next question, “Where are you going to go?”

 

“Does it matter? You’re never going to see me again.”

 

No, in that case, he supposed it didn’t. But he still had questions, questions from this afternoon alone, questions about war and things that couldn’t be named and questions about her that he doubted she would ever answer. Somehow he needed to know though, the word war ringing in his ears, he had to know more about it.

 

“This war, you talked about today, what’s really going to happen?” He asked and then clarified, “You see I’m going to be an auror when I graduate and I want to know what I’ll be dealing with.”

 

“Terrorism essentially, and a cult I suppose. He talks very big and people talk big about him but they forget the threat when Grindlewald was still at large; they forget what real war looks like.”

 

“Who talks big?” He asked his voice sounding more panicked and desperate than he had expected it to.

 

“People get weird whenever I say it… Oh what the hell, Lord Voldemort.” She looked around the pub desperately as if searching for something but there was nothing except a few patrons blinking into their fire whiskey, “This is so surreal.”

 

“Lord…” He started but she interrupted him.

 

“Revolutionary, cult leader, flight of death, very good speaker, and very intense man.” She summarized, “Also not good to mess with because he will cut you.”

 

“And he causes a war.” He said his mind drifting somewhere away from his head so that the words were just spoken.

 

“Well, that’s debatable but he does certainly rile things up a bit.”

 

“And it’s bad.”

 

“A good chunk of the young British wizarding population will die because of it.” She said casually as if these words meant nothing to her as if it was just some casual observation of the universe.

 

“How can you just say that?” He asked her.

 

“They’re only words.” She answered and he began to wonder just what kind of a person she really was and if Sirius hadn’t been right about her after all. She did terrify him just a little bit and if she was serious…

 

After that he found he didn’t have any other questions.

 

“Well, if that’s all, I’ll be off. Have a good rest of your life.”

 

And that was it. As she promised he never saw Little Lily again, although he told Lily-flower about her when they met back up in school.

 

Things returned to normal. They went back to Hogwarts, started in on their final year of courses, and it seemed like Little Lily had never even existed. Certainly his friends seemed to think so, they had more or less come to the consensus that it had been some sort of a joke, that she wasn’t really a time traveler and that there was no war or dark lord. More than that, they pinned it on James saying he made the whole thing up, like it was some new elaborate kind of prank that he’d pulled on his friends for one last huzzah before their seventh year. For them that was the end of it, there were other things to worry about, and Little Lily wasn’t one of them.

 

He found himself thinking about her a lot though and about their last conversation.

 

A dark lord, she had said, and that he would cause a terrible war in which many people would die.

 

He didn’t want to believe it, tried not to, but there were signs everywhere when you looked for them. Lucius Malfoy and his ilk were always sneaking out or at these weird parties with one another, sometimes James would glance at the Slytherin table and he’d notice that they’d have this purpose to them, this unshakeable fire that burned in them more than the other tables. Severus Snape still glared at him with loathing, at Sirius, but it was a knowing glare instead of a helpless one as if he knew something they didn’t; like he was just biding his time.

 

And the anti-muggle born sentiment was only growing stronger.

 

He asked Lily about it one time. She was curled against him in the Gryffindor common room late at night, they were staring into the fire place watching the flames dance and he couldn’t help but think back on everything that had happened, “Lily, are you… Are you worried? About politics I mean?”

 

She frowned at him but in a teasing way that didn’t take his words seriously, “That’s not like you, so serious James Potter, one would think you’re an adult.”

 

“No, really, Lily, are you worried?” He asked.

 

Her frowned deepened to match his, she looked him straight in the eye, and her eyes were so very beautiful, “When Severus called me… Yes, it’s always been bad but… Yes I’m worried sometimes.”

 

An orphan by war and prophecy, Little Lily had said, and now James couldn’t stop thinking those words.

 

He wanted to be an auror when he graduated.

 

He’d always wanted to be an auror when he graduated but it had been for the wrong reasons for a long time. He’d wanted to be famous, to win lots of battle, to fight evil and save maidens but he hadn’t really wanted to fight evil. Now it was different, he wanted to protect people, people like his girlfriend Lily who had done nothing wrong and who had everything to offer the world. He wanted to do something good for the world.

 

So it was by the end of the school year that he made up his mind.

 

It took a few weeks of spying beneath his father’s old invisibility cloak with the map in his hands, and a few weeks of watching how sometimes in the middle of the night Lucius Malfoy, the Lestrange twins and even Snape would leave Hogwarts via portkey just outside the wards and return only very early in the morning.

 

Just a few weeks and then by the end of school he was ready.

 

He followed them to the edge of the woods silently and carefully placed his hand on the portkey to travel with them and found himself in a very dark room lit with candles. Everyone was wearing masks, silver masks without real faces, and they were all in dark hooded robes looking more like shadows than real people.

 

And in the center there was only one man with his face visible.

 

He was very tall, with dark hair, and pale blue eyes and when he looked at James for a moment James swore that the man was looking straight at him through the invisibility cloak. He looked at James as if he could hear James’ very heart beating in his chest and James knew without anyone needing to tell him that this was who Little Lily had been talking about, this was the dark lord.

 

“Good evening, my loyal Death Eaters. We have gathered here tonight to induct several new members into our fold.” His voice was strange, it was clear, precise, but more than that it wasn’t harsh or commanding or terrifying. It was a voice you were compelled to listen to and more believe in; not the voice of a dark lord.

 

“Step forward, initiates.” He commanded and the group that James had come in with, only just graduated from Hogwarts, stepped forward and kneeled in the center of the room.

 

“Today you start your future as leaders of the next generation. Those who will save our society from the disease and stagnation caused by the mudbloods. It is you that our future children will look towards when they graduate Hogwarts with gratitude, respect, and admiration for what you have sacrificed to save your nation. The future applauds you.” He smiled down at them, but it wasn’t a kind smile, it never reached his eyes.

 

“Your arms, gentlemen.”

 

They rolled up their dark sleeves to reveal their pale and shaking arms to the dark lord. He took them one at a time, whispering some spell, and then they would start screaming and trying to move away but he held them still. All the while James watched fascinated and horrified as a dark cloud would appear on their arms, swirling into focus until it revealed itself to be a twisted snake eating the moon.

 

James closed his eyes, biting on his tongue to keep from vomiting, this wasn’t what he had pictured.

 

He didn’t know what he had pictured but it wasn’t this all of the sudden it was all very real.

 

But James Potter wanted to be an auror, he wanted Lily, his beautiful fiery Lily to be safe and in a world where these people existed she could never be. He wanted to stop things before they got too large to control.

 

Godric Gryffindor would have done it, and that was all that really mattered.

 

He kept his sight on the dark lord, careful to keep himself concealed under the cloak, not moving even as they applauded as they chanted dark unknown words and as they listened to the man speak. He waited until they began shuffling out, using various portkeys, he waited until it was just him and the man alone in the room without anyone else getting in the way.

 

He’d decided it wouldn’t be the unforgivable, that it’d be an overpowered reducto charm or something like that, and that he’d go without Sirius or anyone else so that it’d only be him.

 

And he thought about Lily, Lily who deserved a world where there wasn’t a war, and all the others who didn’t deserve to die.

 

He slowly, so slowly, straightened his arm beneath the cloak and aimed straight for the dark lord’s heart.

 

He barely got started on the wand movements before everything went black.

 

Later, he assumed it was later, he found himself bound by magic in some back room. The room was brightly lit and terribly plain compared to the other one, there were only two chairs, the one he was in and one other where the dark lord himself sat.

 

“James Potter, age seventeen, Gryffindor, head boy, prospective auror, and heir to the noble and most ancient house of Potter.” He listed off his eyes intent on James boring into him and James couldn’t even bring himself to look away. The dark was dressed differently, as a muggle, in a plain black suit but all the same he looked just as deadly as he had before.

 

For a moment the man said nothing and James wondered what he would ask because James had been so stupid. Why had he thought this would work? Because he was a Gryffindor, because it had to work, because he had to do something and he always wanted to be an auror?

 

In retrospect if was almost suicidal but he had been so desperate because it had all seemed so real.  

 

Every time he closed his eyes he saw Lily and he just knew he couldn’t let things lie.

 

“You’ve been talking to all the wrong people, my young friend.” The man drawled, as if dark lords were allowed to drawl, and cruel and lazy smile flickered across his face.

 

“What?”

 

“It was very Gryffindor of you to charge in here, to kill me before I got started, heroic and well-intentioned but none the less very stupid. Do you want to guess why?” He asked looking at James as if he really expected an answer.

 

“Because you’re going to kill me!” James spat back although he was wondering why he wasn’t dead yet if this man really was a dark lord.

 

The man seemed to consider this option for a moment, turning it over in his head making James feel sick, and only then responded, “Perhaps, we’ll see. But that’s not the point, try again.”

 

James looked into the man’s eyes for a few moments sick of the game all of a sudden, because it was a game, this man was toying with him like a kneazle toys with the rat it was about to eat.

 

“I don’t know.” James ground out clenching his teeth.

 

“This country has been on the edge of ruin since before the Second World War began.  Mudbloods are convenient to hate, more than that they’re necessary to hate, things are changing and Wizarding Britain is slowly but surely collapsing under its own weight and it’s so convenient to have a scapegoat.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“What did you imagine would happen if you killed me, Potter? Did you think it would stop? That your girlfriend would be safe and everything would be fine? When you cut off the head the body doesn’t always die, Potter, sometimes it runs around in circles for a few minutes, trampling to death all the ants that get caught under its feet. If I died here and now they would still hate mudbloods and they would still want to paint London red in blood.” He smiled politely across at James, waiting for him to interrupt and say something.

 

All James could think about was Lily, that people hated Lily, were thinking about killing Lily because this bastard was on a power high. It wasn’t even personal and James was seeing red.

 

“So you’re just using them?”

 

“It can be argued that they are also using me. They needed a leader, a vision, a direction, and I provided them with one. Again, though, that’s hardly the point. You made another rather large mistake, one that is greater than taking me on alone surrounded by followers, than believing it would matter even if you did miraculously succeed, one that is so glaring that it can hardly be ignored.”

 

“What?” He asked, his eyes burning, tears of anger and frustration gathering at the corner of his vision as he recognized that this was it; that this was the end of everything.

 

“You talked with the time traveler without realizing that she is inherently a thing of destruction.”

 

And just like that there was one last flash of light and a thud as his body hit the floor.

 

* * *

 

_“I really hate time travelling.”_

 

_“Well, it certainly could have been cleaner. On the up side I think you just killed your father.”_

 

Lily had officially run out of options. She and Wizard Lenin had been trying to crack the time travelling thing for months. It wasn’t that they didn’t have any direction or any ideas more that things had to be done carefully. Glitches at very high speeds, speeds required so that she didn’t go splat when accelerating at an unbelievable rate in order to near the speed of light, were very tricky and so in order to avoid them she’d been building equipment. To build equipment they needed research and to research they had needed a place to stay and that had eventually led from Glasses to a younger Wizard Lenin.

 

Strangely enough he’d been very happy to see her, like he knew her already, something the present Wizard Lenin had refused to expand upon or even talk about except for saying that past Wizard Lenin had mistaken her for someone else.

 

It seemed her entire vacation in the past was a case of mixed identities.

 

She was sipping tea in his back office, a very neat and orderly place, devoid of all the culty things he kept in the front for the minions. It was all very Wizard Lenin actually, he was very Wizard Lenin, and it was so odd being able to see him in person.

 

It made her wonder if it would be like this when Wizard Lenin finally did get his body.

 

She was also trying to ignore the fact that she may have inadvertently gotten Glasses killed.

 

He was nice, sort of, a bit of an ass but his head was sort of in the right place. Of his asshole friends he was the one who was the least dickish, that was why she had told him so much, but it seemed he had taken it far too seriously and decided to take matters into his own hands.

 

 _“I did not just kill my father, I killed Glasses, it’s different.”_ Lily responded back to Wizard Lenin.

 

_“Your father is Glasses, Lily, that was a younger version of James Potter. Believe me, I know, I lived during this time period if you’ll recall.”_

 

Wizard Lenin usually knew his stuff. He’d been naming people the whole time from Sirius Black, her father, all his best friends, and others but all the same she was hardly willing to believe Glasses was her father. Glasses didn’t really seem all that paternal, plus he was dead and she wasn’t, also she really didn’t want to be responsible for the death of her own father.

 

 _“Yes because we wouldn’t want to cause a paradox, would we?”_ Wizard Lenin spat in her head, he’d been upset for some time about this and wasn’t about to let her forget it, _“We wouldn’t want to somehow turn ourselves into some sort of glitch in reality, would we?”_

 

Unsaid, but lurking in his words all the same, was the thought that Lily was now on par with Rabbit in the fact that she should not actually exist since she had killed her own father before her conception.

 

This, Wizard Lenin insisted, had never happened in his own past.

 

Glasses, James Potter, had gone on to be an auror just like he said he would and had then joined the Order of the Phoenix later marrying Lily Evans. He wasn’t slated to die a gruesome death until 1981, almost ten years later.

 

So there she was, drinking tea, and wondering how it had all spiraled out of control when she wasn’t even there.

 

Just then the dark lord walked in, “Well, that was certainly interesting.”

 

“So, what happened to Glasses?” She asked not quite sure she wanted to hear.

 

“He had promise, I’m sure with proper training he would have been a fine auror, but sadly because of that it was best he was disposed of before his wealth and talent could be used against me.”

 

She and Wizard Lenin had come to a similar conclusion but all the same she had been hoping it wasn’t true.

 

“Well, that’s… too bad.”

 

“Indeed. It will be written up as an accident though, a spell gone wrong. It can happen especially with those finicky high level dangerous spells, they can backfire if you aren’t careful. This isn’t the time to announce myself and go making enemies, not yet.”

 

They were silent for a moment each thinking on the young dead man, Lily wondering if his friends would somehow think to blame her for his death, and she wondered if it hurt because he looked so much like Death did.

 

It felt personal.

 

Life moved on though and there was a future that needed her more than the 1970’s, “Anyways about this whole time travel stuck in the seventies you having a cult thing…”

**Author's Note:**

> I believe this was prompted by someone asking for a story where Lily travels back in time and meets her parents age 10-17 and there's mistaken identity everywhere. Naturally, this ends in James' tragic death.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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